Sequential Pattern Mining (SPM) is a type of data mining that is concerned with finding statistically relevant patterns between data values where the values are delivered in a sequence.
SPM is widely used in applications, such as: click stream analysis, shopping list analysis, calling pattern analysis in telecom, and gene sequence analysis. Several algorithms, such as the Generalized Sequential Pattern (GSP) algorithm and the PrefixSpan algorithm, which were created from various research efforts to solve this important problem. However, although various algorithms have been proposed and great progress has been achieved within the last decade, the algorithm complexity is still very high. For example, assuming that in a given website there are 100 kinds of webpages and the average length of a session is 10 minutes, the number of possible patterns could be 10010.
Considering processor and memory limitations of a single computer, a more efficient approach to SPM is needed in the industry.